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Beliefs

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The idea of doctors taking an active role in ending people's lives cannot but have ominous overtones for Jews, even for those who feel that such action might sometimes be justified.

Recent studies have demonstrated how the Nazi program of exterminating about 200,000 mentally ill or physically handicapped people between 1939 and 1945 provided a first run for the Holocaust and a training ground for many of its leading perpetrators.

There is no strictly logical connection between that chapter of history and contemporary discussions of euthanasia or doctor-assisted suicide. Michael Burleigh, the writer of one of the studies, "Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945" (Cambridge University Press, 1994), even says he tends to favor voluntary forms of these practices.

But "Jews are particularly sensitive to any decision that says it is O.K. for a certain class of people to die or be allowed to be killed," said Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan and will be speaking there on Thursday on "Suffering and Healing in the Jewish Tradition."

Given this sensitivity, it is surprising how little public reaction has come from Jewish organizations or religious authorities after the two recent Appeals Court decisions legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. If upheld by the Supreme Court, these decisions could drastically alter the way that Americans approach dying and all that surrounds it: disease, aging, medical practice and family responsibilities.

To be sure, other events have been competing for Jews' attention, from Passover to the rising conflict in Lebanon. But Jewish groups and their leaders have found time to worry publicly about Marlon Brando's comments on the Jewish role in the movie industry on "Larry King Live" and whether David Irving's biography of Joseph Goebbels finds an American publisher.

Not everyone, however, has been reticent or distracted. In a column for Religion News Service, Rabbi A. James Rudin, Interreligious Affairs Director at the American Jewish Committee, urged religious communities to address the "troubling questions" raised by the court rulings.

Agudath Israel, a strongly Orthodox Jewish movement, has also condemned the two court decisions and promised to enter a brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse them.

There was nothing unusual about these views. As a round of phone calls to a range of Jewish religious leaders confirmed, Jewish tradition is firmly opposed to suicide or directly ending a life to avoid pain.

Individual Jewish authorities as well as the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform branches differ somewhat on when it is appropriate to withhold or withdraw treatment that might prolong a painful period of dying. But virtually all maintain a sharp distinction between that and directly causing a death or helping dying patients kill themselves.

"Even someone like myself who might imagine a case for an occasional active ending of life," said Baruch A. Brody, "thinks that is a distinction that should not be obviated." Dr. Brody, the director of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, will be participating this weekend on a conference on Jewish biomedical ethics at Georgetown University.

So why has this consensus not yet been projected into the public discussion?

"Partly it is politically correct," Rabbi Rudin said. Doctor-assisted suicide, he said, "is linked to personal freedom, which we're all for, but in this case the result is so irrevocable and people are so vulnerable."

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of Reform Judaism's Religious Action Center in Washington, identified some of those counterforces as the high value many Jews put on "fundamental human dignity, freedom of choice and protection of privacy."

He also stressed "the reality that often the best way to protect the right of people to live in accord with their own religious dictates is to keep the Government out, which is the attitude of many Jews on the abortion issue."

That view was echoed by two other Jewish leaders. Although finding doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia sharply at odds with Jewish tradition, they seemed content -- or resigned -- to having the courts dismantle barriers to these practices.

Dr. Fred Rosner, a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and widely published authority on Jewish medical ethics, believes with great sadness that Western medicine is moving steadily toward actively killing patients, possibly without their consent.

"Why expend our energies in fighting something that will come anyway," he said, "and doesn't affect me directly because I am not obligated, in a country with separation of church and state, to do something against my scruples?"

Rabbi Richard F. Address, director of the Committee on Bioethics for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the national organization of Reform synagogues, simultaneously warned against the legalization of doctor-assisted suicide by state legislatures and said he had no problem with the courts making this "a freedom of choice issue."

Both emphasized education aimed at persuading Jews not to avail themselves of what the law might come to allow. But Rabbi Harlan J. Wechsler, who teaches ethics at Jewish Theological Seminary, argued that Jews had a deep stake in the state of the law.

"There are times when the state can and should step back for the right of an individual or a family to do as they choose," he said, "but here you're dealing with a basic value, and with distinctions between allowing to die and taking life that we've discussed for thousands of years."

A number of Jewish leaders thought that the current quiet would not last.

Rabbi Saperstein: "Most of the groups want time to think this through carefully."